Anais Quotes

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. ~ Anais Nin

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. ~ Anais Nin

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. ~ Anais Nin

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love - the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations - forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs. ~ Anais Nin

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return. ~ Anais Nin

Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death ~ Anais Nin

I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae ... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered. ~ Anais Nin

I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots. ~ Anais Nin

Around her hair there was a saffron aureole, and her skin was a sea shell ... ~ Anais Nin

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be ... including our perception. Of it ~ Anais Nin

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are 'still' struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it bre ~ Terri Windling

Tonight I am all in flames. ~ Anais Nin

She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings. ~ Anais Nin

I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away. ~ Anais Nin

Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude. ~ Anais Nin

But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was. ~ Anais Nin

One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery. ~ Anais Nin

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. ~ Anais Nin

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. ~ Anais Nin

When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall into darkness after the collusion with pain, and after pain the divine departure. ~ Anais Nin

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. ~ Anais Nin

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them. ~ Anais Nin

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. ~ Anais Nin

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine. ~ Anais Nin

I can only connect deeply or not at all. ~ Anais Nin

Anais Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. "It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
Ain't that the truth. I see that look on others' faces when I'm drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I've turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I've always feared that they think I'm going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself.
Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real. ~ Sarah Wilson

He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures. ~ Anais Nin

Every disconnection is death. ~ Anais Nin

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness. ~ Anais Nin

Safe there from inquiry and exposure? But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother's eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother's eyes, and seen herself through her mother's eyes. Children were like kittens, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents. ~ Anais Nin

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving. ~ Anais Nin

No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another. ~ Anais Nin

I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feelings, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless. ~ Anais Nin

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream. ~ Anais Nin

In chaos, there is fertility. ~ Anais Nin

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever. ~ Anais Nin

To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial. ~ Anais Nin

Atrophy of feeling creates criminals. ~ Anais Nin

I am eleven years old, I know, and I am not serious enough. Last night I said to myself: tomorrow I will be good. Good? I wasn't any better than I was the day before. Now here is a new month, and I haven't yet thought out how to be more sensible, how to master my impulses and my temper. I am ashamed to be so undisciplined. ~ Anais Nin

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you. ~ Anais Nin

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated. ~ Anais Nin

They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it. ~ Anais Nin

I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things. ~ Anais Nin

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons. ~ Anais Nin

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. ~ Anais Nin

To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I'm neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained. ~ Anais Nin

what she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength. ~ Anais Nin

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair. ~ Anais Nin

I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds. ~ Anais Nin

In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict. ~ Anais Nin

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of. ~ Marguerite Young

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations. ~ Anais Nin

She hadn't been Rachel that night. She was evidence, a body of things to be picked and probed at, pictured and asked about, recorded and quoted. I want my life back. The voice was faint inside her own mind. She could hear the plaintive, almost despairing note to that voice. Like the wail of a scared child, this wasn't just about facing her fears. This was about everything. Her injuries, the loss of the life and world she'd once taken for granted, her long recovery. ~ Anais Torres

Pleasure is an attitude, not a person or place. - Diary 6, pg. 52 ~ Anais Nin

I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams. ~ Anais Nin

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way. ~ Anais Nin

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. ~ Anais Nin

Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire. ~ Anais Nin

Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it. ~ Anais Nin

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. ~ Anais Nin

I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise. ~ Anais Nin

No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.
When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them. ~ Anais Nin

If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves, said the modern Christ.
But none of us could bear to pass through the tunnel which led from the house into the world on the other side of the walls, where there were leaves on the trees, where water ran beside the paths, where there was daylight and joy. We could not believe that the tunnel would open on daylight: we feared to be trapped into darkness again; we feared to return whence we had come, from darkness and night. The tunnel would narrow and taper
down as we walked; it would close around us, and close tighter and tighter around us and stifle us. It would grow heavy and narrow and suffocate us as we walked. ~ Anais Nin

She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only. ~ Anais Nin

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. ~ Anais Nin

All adventurers came to grief. Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol. ~ Anais Nin

If you can't create, you destroy. ~ Anais Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook. ~ Anais Nin

To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right. ~ Anais Nin

We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility. ~ Anais Nin

She had forced the hourglass of pain to turn. They had pursued each other. They had tried to possess each other. They had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love. ~ Anais Nin

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror. ~ Anais Nin

You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you. ~ Anais Nin

Gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams. ~ Anais Nin

Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering. ~ Anais Nin

Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death. ~ Anais Nin

Myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth ~ Anais Nin

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness ... A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there. ~ Anais Nin

You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. ~ Anais Nin

We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and ~ Anais Nin

Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way. ~ Anais Nin

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness. ~ Anais Nin

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion. ~ Anais Nin

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain. ~ Anais Nin

We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. Anais Nin ~ Debbie Hampton

Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. ~ Anais Nin

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe. ~ Anais Nin

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. ~ Anais Nin

He was supposed to be the first man to tell her that she was beautiful and help her determine who she was before anyone had the opportunity to label her. She was supposed to be his "little girl". ~ Anais Torres

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. ~ Anais Nin

For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings. ~ Anais Nin

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you. ~ Anais Nin

I am happy today. I am a tyrant. ~ Anais Nin

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it. ~ Anais Nin

Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her. ~ Anais Nin

I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes. ~ Anais Nin

So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions. ~ Anais Nin

To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you. ~ Anais Nin

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. ~ Anais Nin